Your mobile design is pretty, but is it touch friendly? Plunk lets you find out

It’s clear now that design is a big part of the mobile experience — heck, we dedicated an entire conference to the topic — but it’s still difficult for developers to balance touch functionality with an attractive interface. The design firm Zurb intends to fix this with Plunk, a new app runs simple tests for touchscreen targets.

In Plunk, you upload a mobile screen — it can be from an app, a mobile website, or anything else viewable on a mobile device — and create simple tests to make sure your users can easily touch where they need to. This Plunk test asks you to touch the flower in a cartoony image. Plunk’s results page for every test lets you see just how successful visitors are in real time — in this example, it could eventually tell the designer that the flower isn’t distinguished enough from the other images.

With Plunk, designers should be able to easily see what works for mobile touch interaction. It’ll be especially appealing to the responsive design movement, which is focused on creating web designs that morph to fit different device screen sizes.